PenRight! for Windows

From Pen Computing #5 June/July 1995

The marketplace for PDAs, pen based computers and mobile computing
platforms is being defined by the people who write application software for the industry.
Development tools attract developers to any particular platform, great tools attract great
developers. PenRight! for Windows is just such a great tool.

And why is that?
PenRight! for Windows has succeeded in reaching quite a few goals that greatly ease the
burden people or companies needing to implement systems on mobile platforms will face. As
orchestrated by Philip Shoemaker, PenRight! Corporation's architect of the PenRight! for
Windows product, PenRight! for Windows provides support for almost all MSDOS based, MSDOS
DPMI, and MSWindows based pen enabled platforms with fast running code consuming less RAM.
If you look carefully into users' needs, as software developers who want to stay in
business do, these efficiencies defeat the universal problems with mobile computing
platforms: slow execution of code and short battery life. Slow executable speed was the
major complaint about first generation PDAs such as the Casio Z-7000/Tandy Zoomer.
PenRight! Pro and now PenRight! for Windows have come along to rescue this highly
underrated platform, and the rest of the MSDOS and MSWindows stable of mobile platforms. A
big requirement was to be able to incorporate new technologies and peripherals such as fax
capability and recognition technology improvements. A suite of PenRight! applications
including a calculator and an address book with built-in fax capability is available as a
separate bundle from Casio.

As with the previous generations of PenRight Corporation's software
development kits, the PenRight! for Windows tool allows the programmer to not worry about
what the target platform of an application is. By providing an absolutely consistent look
and feel for everything from the Zoomer to the Pentium, PenRight levels the playing field,
bringing pen enabled application development into the hands of anyone who has written some
C language code, the lingua franca of today's desktop computers. PenRight! allows mobile
computing platform developers to leverage this huge pool of programming talent onto mobile
computing platforms.

A Legacy Improved
PenRight! for Windows is the successor to the well accepted PenRight! Pro Software
Development Kit. PenRight! Pro is designed for use on MSDOS based platforms, which
includes PDAs running GEOS, such as the Casio Z-7000/Tandy Zoomer. PenRight! Pro provides
a consistent environment across many different devices, and that helps application
developers like me from having to learn the ins and outs of every different type of
hardware platform a user may wish to run my application on.

Well over a thousand vertical applications on a large variety of
platforms have been created using PenRight Pro! Many of the developers of these
applications were looking at porting their apps over to the fast growing community of
Windows based pen computers. So the move to MSWindows is a no-brainer for the aggressive
PenRight Corporation. PenRight Corporation has essentially added a vast new marketplace
for its development tools, Microsoft Windows.

By producing applications for the two most popular computer
operating systems in the world, PenRight! for Windows has placed itself squarely in the
major leagues for pen enabled application development.

The Big Story
"Because of PenRight!'s unique design we're able to eliminate our customers' risk of
having to choose between building applications for Windows or DOS. Now with the click of a
button they can have both." said David Marino, president of PenRight! Corporation.

The best part of this is that PenRight! for Windows will move an
application's source code over from PenRight! Pro DOS to MSWindows or, demanded by quite a
few shops, DOS DPMI platforms. Further, PenRight! Pro will produce source code for both
Windows platforms, and non Windows platforms from the same work files. This is a life
saver. Sad to say, some mobile platforms are gone, such as Compaq's pen based Concerto
laptop. Software specific to any platform is a white elephant before it is even completed!
Companies that have software developed for a specific PDA or mobile computer are at risk
of customers switching to newer, cheaper platforms as the PC wars move down to the
handheld arena.

The project created or imported into PenRight! for Windows can run
on all the platforms currently supported by PenRight! Pro, while also producing code for
Microsoft Windows. This allows companies to invest in a single source code base, while
deploying systems on a multitude of platforms. That's the kind of leverage that today's
change or die world demands of software developers.

PenRight! for Windows cross platform capability is a big bonus for
software developers. It means a scientific calculator I wrote for the Tandy Zoomer will
now run under Microsoft Windows, with almost no further effort on my part beyond clicking
a button in the PenRight! for Windows application. That's a big gift to a small software
developer who cannot afford to hire an army to staff a department for every device and
hardware platform out there.

Does it have support for you know what?
PenRight! for Windows is Palm Computing's Graffiti enabled. If the platform is supported
by Palm Computing, then PenRight! will be Graffiti enabled on that platform. The
programmer or the user can optionally choose a previous generation recognizer built into
PenRight! platform runtimes. Unfortunately, Palm Computing is not currently shipping a
recognizer for MS Windows (though, ahem, it exists). But, PenRight! for Windows is already
enabled to use Graffiti when it does become available to Windows. Applications I have
built with PenRight! on my development PC without Graffiti work flawlessly on my Tandy
Zoomer with Graffiti.

Along with the trademark Graffiti single character cell data entry
window, PenRight allows text to be entered anywhere on the screen and still recognized by
the Graffiti recognizer. Another small departure from the Graffiti standard is a
horizontal line drawn from right to left across any number of characters will erase all
the characters under the line.
Another nice touch is provided by PenRight!'s Susan Sico who is responsible for the
incorporation of the Graffiti recognizer engine into PenRight!. Her sample code gives
users a facility for "macros", or simple shortcuts, for long words or phrases.
For example "Enter Your Social Security Number" could be encoded in, say, 3
characters, "SS?". As is to be expected, PenRight! runtimes all come with popup
keyboard support for hunt and peck character entry.

A Visual Pen Computing Toolkit
PenRight! Corporation has always been a big believer in the benefit of visual tools. That
means it is easier to draw a form on a screen than it is to write the code to do the same
thing. PenRight! for Window's Integrated Graphical Environment lets you write programs for
a pen computer the same way that Microsoft's Visual C++ or Visual Basic allow programmers
to write programs for Windows. To a professional programmer, that means you write code
where it's easier to do so, and you draw forms where that's easier.{ Here's the spot to
insert the main graphic of all the tools }

The Integrated Graphical Environment runs as an MDI, or Multiple
Document Interface, application, allowing for simultaneous editing of multiple projects
and multiple views of the same project. A Project Window supports a graphical tree of
everything in the developer's application. This includes databases, forms, and code. This
is a sort of schematic view of the application, where every form, or screen, gets its own
icon. Starting from an icon called Start, you draw lines by dragging the mouse to connect
one form with another. For example, a button labeled "Help" on a form could be
connected to a form designated to display help text.

Double-clicking the mouse over practically anything in the
Integrated Graphical Environment launches a Code Editor window. This window contains all
the code written by the programmer, or by PenRight! for Windows itself. The Code Editor
sections code up into specific Events and Functions. An Event can be a ButtonPress or
ListScroll, or any event PenRight! Pro has a built-in understanding of. A Function can be
anything the programmer wishes to create, such as a function to compute the square of a
number, or look up a name in a database, or anything else. Programmers experienced with
object oriented programming's notion of a browser window will appreciate this window
immediately over a plain vanilla text window such as the NotePad program that comes as an
accessory in MS Windows.

Associated with every form, button, text field or other visual
object in the project is a Hierarchical Property Sheet. This is a particularly useful
idea. Associated with any drawn object comes a bevy of information that is often hard to
get a single view of. A simple line of text, such as, "Enter your first name:",
contains the following properties: ID, left, top, height, width, text, color, font, font
size, font style, and pattern. Each type of visual object has its own properties, and some
properties-such as the font, font size and font style-form their own subgroup. The
Hierarchical Property Sheet, activated by means of a popup menu when the user presses the
right mouse button, provides a very smooth editing environment for this disparate
information.

PenRight! Corporation is targeting the commercial vertical market
application developer who needs to do mobile data collection. So a database suite of
services has always been part of the PenRight programming tools. So it is with PenRight!
for Windows. The user merely clicks on the toolbar's Create Database icon, and a database
icon is added to the project. Double clicking on this icon brings up a database schema
manager window. This window controls the layout of a database table needed by the
application. The database files are laid out in the PC world's ubiquitous dBASE file
format, understood by practically all database manager software.

Help Me!
PenRight! for Windows contains an on-line help facility that provides the entire API
(Application Programming Interface) reference. This is very handy when a programmer is
focused on the screen, and does not wish to break his or her concentration for a long hunt
for a misplaced manual. PenRight! for Windows also sports the currently popular toolbar
that allows users to click on individual icons for specific actions such as "Open
Project", "Help" or "Undo".

Future Plans and Add Ons
PenRight! Corporation has just announced a bundling arrangement with Casio, manufacturer
of the Casio Z-7000 and Tandy Zoomer, that includes the PenRight runtimes, and a small
suite of applications that are very useful to have as accessories to an application. These
are PenRight runtimes, a phone book application with built in fax, a program launcher
window, a calculator and the Graffiti recognition engine.
While Chris Temple of the marketing department at PenRight Corporation keeps to himself on
this, PenRight! for Windows has its eye on moving its code onto other, unnamed platforms
in the near future. My own, non confirmed speculation is that OS/2 would be easy, and
that, followed by the Apple Newton would be a pen based grand slam!
The new PenRight!for Windows SDK will be released in May. List price is $595. Upgrade
price for developers currently using PenRight!Pro v3.6 is $349.